Wednesday 5 August 2009 14.30 EDT
First published on Wednesday 5 August 2009 14.30 EDT

For five years, people have been contributing to OpenStreetMap – the Wikipedia-like attempt to create a free, user-generated map of the world.

Thanks to the project, millions of people now use free maps online or on their phones, and OpenStreetMap covers large swathes of major cities around the globe. In fact, it's got so much information that some users in Germany are now plotting incredible amounts of detail – such as the location of individual trees.

Is that mission accomplished? Not at all, says Steve Coast, the project's founder.

"We've convinced a lot of people, but not a lot in TeleAtlas or NavTeq [the world's two biggest digital geo-data providers]. To do that, the next step – the ultimate thing – is that we have to take business away from them."

He is confident that open schemes will eventually push their way into the spotlight, but there are still hitches.

"It's a little bit chicken and egg, because the project needs good map data to encourage people to use map data," he says. "We need to take it beyond the primary audience of early adopters and more into the mainstream."

Getting more people to contribute is crucial for any community-driven scheme, but particularly for maps – often associated with anorak-clad hikers waving GPS units. That's why a number of people are trying to come up with new ways to track information and get it into the system.

One such is the cartographic geek Michal Migurski, a partner at the Californian design and technology consultancy Stamen. He created Oakland Crimespotting, one of the earliest online heat maps of crime data, and his company has done a lot of pioneering work with online maps: now he is trying to broaden the ways in which people can contribute to OSM.

One of the schemes he is experimenting with, called Walking Papers, aims to let users add to OSM's data by printing out maps, drawing on them, and then scanning them back in.

"In the past you had to use a GPS unit," says Migurski. "Now you have a much lighter-weight piece of technology – a paper and pencil in your pocket."

Walking Papers is certainly lo-fi compared with the oodles of expensive kit that many contributors tote, but it is filling a need. Ed Parsons, Google UK's geospatial technologist, says that it is becoming increasingly important to find ways to keep people interested in adding more data to these schemes.

"It's easy to be motivated to get the information when your town is just a white space on the map," he says. "But once it's there, will you be as motivated to keep it updated as things change?"

The evidence so far is positive, given the breadth of information that OSM and others have collected – and continue to collect. Perhaps most interestingly, it is only after these vast repositories have been collected that new possibilities begin to emerge. Once you've got maps of the world, what else can you do? What other layers can you bring? How can you improve geodata beyond simply creating free versions of what already exists?

Migurski suggests that this is where the involvement of big organisations can start to make a real difference.

"When we first produced Oakland Crimespotting it was a really a guerrilla scraping," he says. "We considered what we were doing was liberating that data. Now we're seeing cities take the initiative and publish stuff with an eye to seeing projects like Crimespotting come out of it – the data itself is the public good."

Parsons goes further. He thinks the future of geographic data relies on breaking out of the mapping mindset and thinking more broadly (which is perhaps no surprise, given Google's interest in advertising).

"The future is probably not about maps – or it's about having the information, but not giving it back to people in the form of a map," he says.

"For example, if I'm looking for food at 1am on a Friday night then I am probably looking for something very different than if I am looking for food on a Sunday afternoon. If my phone knows about me and a little bit of my history, it can give me different information based on the context: a nearby kebab shop on one hand, or somewhere I can take my parents for lunch on the other."

Further destinations

So is that the best we can hope for? Helping us distinguish between a greasy doner and a leg of lamb?

Those ideas of geographically savvy services have been around for a long time, but tools are now starting to appear that use your geographic context as a piece of background information, not as the end goal. (Parsons points to the iPhone application that tells you your next train home – no maps involved.)

Perhaps, though, the future for geodata is something far bigger: showing that the principles already embodied by Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and others can be applied elsewhere to other subjects. Coast thinks it's a distinct possibility – and adds that perhaps the lessons already learned by OSM can make future projects come together much more quickly.

"There are various shortcuts to making some of this stuff happen – not least of which are the various chunks of source code out there that didn't exist when OpenStreetMap started," he says. "There are some fairly serious chunks that aren't particularly reliant on geodata, so that you could take them and apply them to other types of wiki. It's definitely possible."

Parsons agrees that user-generated maps are succeeding, and that it won't be long before other groups begin applying the same principles elsewhere.

"There is always a community closer to information than a top-down provider can manage, so there are possibilities to create data on things like weather forecasting or climate change, for example," he says. "Maps are perhaps one of the first areas that this change is happening, but I'm sure there are many more to come."